Dark lord of the camera

Page Tools

Bill Henson's sexualised images of adolescents repel
some viewers, but critics are unanimous in hailing his vision,
writes Gina McColl.

If you don't like it, don't look, as my mother used to say. Note
to self: don't take her with me to the Bill Henson retrospective
that opens at the National Gallery of Victoria in Federation Square
on Saturday. She might like the art. But she'd get pretty sick of
telling me to go home.

Critics love to say that Henson, Australia's most celebrated and
collected photographer, divides opinion: you either love him or
hate him. But he doesn't divide the critics. Henson has been a
favourite for 10 years - since he represented Australia at the
Venice Biennale, the premier international contemporary art event,
in 1995.

So what's wrong with me? Am I so postmodern, so inured to beauty
by irony, that I can only respond with embarrassment? Or is it that
this ravishing work, with its obsession with adolescents, twilight,
clouds and grand architecture, is also so melodramatic, overwrought
and cliched in its oppositions? And then there's the kiddie-porn
aesthetic.

After growing up in Glen Waverley and studying at Prahran
College, Bill Henson had his first solo exhibition at the National
Gallery of Victoria in 1975 at the age of 19 - an honour never
before achieved or repeated by such a young photographer. Now 49,
the artist has had more than 60 solo shows in Australia and
internationally. Overseas, his work is held in collections at the
Guggenheim in New York and the Museum Moderner Kunst in Vienna. His
international fans include the The New Yorker's art critic Peter
Schjeldahl and cult American novelist Dennis Cooper, the high
priest of death porn. He is, in short, one of the heavyweights of
the Australian art scene.

Even if you don't know his work, his signature look -
particularly his taste in vulnerable adolescents shot in ominous
settings at night - is probably familiar: it has even been
appropriated by Chopper director Andrew Dominik in a Levi's
commercial for their "born again" 501s.

In many ways, Henson is like an artist from another era. Or a
pint-sized compendium of Great Artist cliches. He is inspired by
great works of classical music, literature, architecture and art.
He is obsessed with beauty, and his photographs have worked and
reworked the same themes for 30 years. And he does all his work
himself: no assistants, and no outsourcing to a laboratory to print
his enormous, luminous colour images. When the best-known
contemporary artists have become more like rock stars - think Brett
Whiteley, Jean Michel Basquiat and Tracey Emin - Bill Henson seems
almost old-fashioned.

With his swept-back dark hair and beard, Henson has even been
described as looking like he belongs in another century. Although
on a weekday morning, in a fashionably tailored shirt and jacket,
he looks more like a diabolical Peter Russell Clarke. In an age in
which art is often seen as having a political role, Henson talks at
length about the experience of the sublime: "Being taken to another
place, distracted in the French sense of the word - this is one of
the primary values and uses of art." He talks like Baudelaire, but
he drinks hot chocolate rather than absinthe.

Rarely blinking as he speaks, Henson is, by his own admission,
"a master of the subordinate clause". His eloquence is absorbing,
up to a point, but it also feels like a wall of words, a schtick
designed to keep conversation about his work general. He veers away
from questions about specific photographs, or from any kind of
interpretation. Henson likes to talk about capital-A Art - beauty,
longing, the power of suggestion - but not his own work.

From the man who is notorious for overseeing every aspect of the
installation and lighting of his work in exhibition, it is another
form of control.

Critics invoke the names of the Old Masters in praising Henson.
The solemnity and beauty of the faces he photographs could have
come from a Goya or a Caravaggio, they say. While he has
occasionally photographed the old and middle-aged, it is his
portraits of beautiful adolescents, mostly girls, with dark hair,
full lips and a vulnerable, Edwardian beauty that are more often
the object of his lens. And it is not just the models themselves
who make the works seem historical. His use of chiaroscuro (the
contrast of light and shade) gives his work a formal likeness to
great art of the past - Rembrandt, Titian - as well as its hallmark
moodiness.

They also look a bit like '80s fashion photos from Italian
Vogue: all those androgynous naked beauties wearing overwrought
jewellery and looming out of the shadows of ancient architecture.
For all his art-historical allusion, Henson is very much plugged
into the Zeitgeist. His erotic photographs of skinny, grimy, gloomy
adolescents have coincided with the rise of "heroin chic" and
sexualised depictions of prepubescents in fashion photography
(Corinne Day), advertising (Calvin Klein) and art (think of
American artist Larry Clarke's movie Kids).

Henson's celebrated Paris Opera works are a series of portraits
of absorbed audience members' faces, framed by Baroque
architecture. But his work is just as likely to feature road signs,
suburban skylines, wrecked cars and industrial wastelands, even an
ATM. Many photographs are imbued with a strong sense of
Australianness: ghostly gums, infernal suburbia, space going to
waste. Despite its sense of place, there is something very German
in his work: a heavy, slightly rotten sense of beauty and fatalism.
Death in Venice recast in Roxburgh Park.

Henson is often called a "painterly" photographer. "It could be
said that he's painting with light," says Daniel Palmer, formerly
curator at the Centre for Contemporary Photography and now a
lecturer at Monash University. Palmer says Henson's work seems
painterly because of its scale and the way it is composed of staged
tableaux (even the Paris Opera was mocked-up in his Melbourne
studio after Henson disliked the photographs he took in France).
"It's the exact opposite of a documentary photograph, where
something happens in front of the lens that the photographer
captures," Palmer says.

The artist's use of colour, particularly his licorice tones and
the mood created by light are also atypical of photography, Palmer
says. "Most art photographers these days work on a conceptual level
and don't get involved in the printing of their work, particularly
if they're working with colour." Henson not only does all his own
printing, but has a bravura mastery of darkroom techniques such as
"burning" and "dodging", in which parts of the paper are obscured
to reduce or increase the exposure to an area, increasing its
intensity of shadow or luminosity. "This really draws out certain
parts of the image, so very large landscape scenes have this
amazing glow of a tree in the distance or a particular light
reflection in a railway scene. He's a great craftsman," Palmer
says.

In recent years, acclaim for Henson's magnificent technical
skills and the formal qualities of his photographs - the use of
colour, light and scale - have obscured any controversy over the
sexual nature of his content. This is a curious phenomenon. In the
'80s it was different - his photos of junkies juxtaposed with grand
interiors and classical architecture disturbed a number of critics
- and controversy dogged him into the '90s.

The so-called sex nocturnes aroused some popular unease when
they were exhibited at the 1995 Venice Biennale, with their
depictions of wasted teenagers who seemed to be having sex,
photographed at night before a towering alpine backdrop. Henson's
1997 photographs of a young model wearing Scanlan and Theodore
clothes, commissioned by the Melbourne fashion house to mark the
label's 10 years in business, also scandalised some. The model
looked about 12 and with her nipple exposed in some photos, there
was concern about the sexual exploitation of a minor. The girl was
later reported to be 16 years old, but this revelation did not
address lingering doubts about encouraging an aesthetic of
fanciable prepubescents.

More recently, critics have been quick to reject such criticism
as righteous indignation and superficiality. Henson himself has
called it hype and borrowed indignation. In part, this is because
graphic depictions of sexuality, and often perverse sexuality, are
commonplace in contemporary art. In Britain, the winner of last
year's Turner Prize was a transvestite potter who makes
neo-Classical vases decorated with tableaux of kinky sex and child
abuse. Makes Henson seem tame.

In photography too, Henson is not alone in his preoccupations
with sexualised youth. Local photographer Polixeni Papapetrou has
exhibited provocative tableaux portraits of her young daughter in
the style of Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, whose
stylised portraits of young girls now seem sinister rather than
sweet. Is it fair that sexualising children seems spookier when
it's done by a man?

Sex and controversy are never bad for sales: just ask Calvin
Klein. Many contemporary artists also see testing the boundaries -
what is art and what pornography? - as their avant-garde duty. And
any hint of censorship brings out passionate defences of the
artist's right to freedom of expression. Remember the furore when
Andres Serrano's photograph Piss Christ was removed from the NGV
after it was attacked by offended Christians?

Henson himself does not invoke freedom of expression or any
other political motives to his work. Instead, he simply says he
finds it strange that there is an acceptance of the ubiquitous
level of realistic violence on television and in cinemas, "but the
moment there's a breast or buttock on the screen, the SWAT team
lands on the roof". This may be true, but it raises the question of
whether an artist bears any moral or political responsibility in
presenting eroticised images of underage children.

What are they all about, these huge shadowy photographs with
their high-art allusions and often edgy content? Don't expect a
definitive answer from Henson himself. "It's the suggestive power
of the medium that's interesting, but it's never more than
subjective," Henson says. "In front of the same photograph, one
person will see the threat of violence or violation, and another
person will see something of tremendous peace and tranquility. I
don't think any two readings are the same."

Ask Henson what he believes is the significance of his own work,
and he repeatedly gives the same response. Except in the most
general terms, he will not discuss the subject matter of his work,
its themes, its formal innovations or how he fits into the
contemporary art scene. Just because he's interested in the history
of art, he says, does not mean he's interested in his own place in
it. "I don't see myself as part of a particular movement or period
... I don't think about the context in which I'm seen by others.
It's for other people to discuss and determine if they're
interested. I'm just trying to make the pictures work."

Henson does have a singular, instantly recognisable vision, and
critics and curators are quick to acknowledge this. For all his
uniqueness, however, they do see him as sharing preoccupations with
other contemporary artists and art movements.

Anne Marsh, associate professor of visual culture at Monash
University, sees Henson as a modernist photographer, and compares
his work to Robert Mapplethorpe. She says: "(He) rose to fame
during postmodernism and his work is controversial. But Henson,
like Mapplethorpe, is a master modernist photographer."

Marsh says Henson's preoccupation with the formal qualities of
photography, particularly light and shadow, and the surface of his
prints, give us clues to his status as a modernist. It's not the
content, she argues, it's the form. "His aesthetic, the way he
mines the darkness of the photograph, (and the fact that) all of
his photographs are untitled," Marsh says. "To me, that's a major
signature of modernism."

Not all critics agree. Juliana Engberg, the artistic director of
the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, argues that Henson is a
postmodernist. She says of all the visual arts, photography is most
burdened with the concept of "the real", and that Henson plays with
this and deconstructs it in his work.

"It's almost sweet, the way we have invested in the truth of the
photographic moment," Engberg says. "When it was revealed that the
famous Kiss by Robert Doisneau had in fact been posed rather than
'captured' from the real moment, there was a sense of hurt and
betrayal. Yet this subsided quickly, and the image remains one of
the most popular photographic items in circulation."

Engberg argues there is a difference between reality (what
exists) and "realism". She says the construction of Doisneau's
picture - the snatching of a moment - allows us to inject into the
image our desire for romance, freedom, and abandon. And it is
precisely this collision between fantasy and reality that Henson
plays with.

Engberg points to the sex nocturnes that Henson showed at the
Venice Biennale. These images, with their controversial
subject-matter of teenagers engaging in real or simulated sex, were
made at a time when Henson was experimenting with collage, and are
cut, spliced, reversed and reassembled.

By slicing and dicing the images, revealing the white paper
beneath the emulsion, Henson is playing with what is reality and
what is fantasy, exploiting our knowledge that the photograph is
staged and constructed. Engberg suggests the collage makes a drama
of whether reality is the paper itself, or the photographed scene.
Whether the fantasy is the cavorting teenagers, or our "sweet"
belief that a picture documents the truth.

Monash lecturer Daniel Palmer admits he is a bit of an acquired
taste. Palmer says he became familiar with Henson's work in the
'90s after a decade of art-world debate about the role of power and
the sexualised nature of the gaze.

"I was very excited about that at a certain time in my life and
it was quite dominant in art practice. But after a while, how does
an artist continue to make that interesting?" Palmer admires Henson
because of the consistency and singularity of his vision, and says
he is able to set aside lingering reservations about the politics
and pretensions of the work and take pleasure in its rich, rather
dark, beauty. "He's a bit of a guilty pleasure," Palmer says.

Modernist or postmodernist? Libertine or licentious old perv?
With his neo-Romantic schtick and fashion-forward sensibility,
Henson fulfills the paradoxes of the great artist that seem just
right for our times. Whether you like it or not is another
thing.

Bill Henson: 3 decades of photography opens at the NGV
Australia, Federation Square, from April 23.